Classic British Flight Sim

Ah. And then modifying them for the other Tynes would have been not cost effective.

Shame.

I don't think it was practical

All the gearbox and auxiliary systems were different....different type of starters, different shape knob on the gear stick.

In a similar vein, they had a very difficult job fitting Hercules from Varsities onto the Hawkair Bristol Freighters and that was a whole new gearbox had to be designed..that sort of thing. But with the Tynes the whole engine has differences, a bit like the difference between the Dart on a Herald and that of a Viscount, just not interchangeable.

Funnily enough there is another type of engine that could have been fitted to the Vanguard

TCA wanted the Bristol Orion which was to power the CL-44 and later Britannia's so Vickers designed the Vanguard wing to take both. TCA were to retrofit the Vanguard when the Orion became available.

It's odd then that since the Vanguard and CL-44 were both to have the Orion that the Tyne installation was so different, but maybe there would have been distinct variations on the Orion too??

The Orion never progressed beyond the flight test stage

Yup.. the differences between naval and aviation fits are more than skin deep I'm afraid and the closest Tyne to the Vanguards is the one in the Belfast. The major difference in the 515 is water injection but otherwise, it's the most similar.
When Hunting were planning to fly Superb to Brooklands, they kept an engine back with one cycle remaining just in case the aircraft suffer an engine failure enroute Many of the engine spares are common and we have a selection of these we'll never ever use. In fact the spares we have are probably the spares no one will ever use which is why we still have them
I honestly don't know where the other operators get their spares from but I can't imagine them being easy to get.

The problem with Superbs starters is one that wouldn't occur during normal ops.. corrosion, caused by sitting outside unused for 15years. Where engine heat and the associated oily atmosphere would normally keep metals protected.. the lack of either let water take charge and with one part of the starter made of steel and the other made of mag-alloy.. the mag-alloy came off worse Fearing the worst, we checked the other 3. The port inner was so-so, the stbd inner was quite good but the stbd outer was worse than the port outer.. but still ran! We 'liberated' the starter off a display engine at the museum but that still left one is a poor state. Also, the brushes aren't up to much on any of the starters and while I'm sure these could be made, the funding isn't available for such bespoke work. It's never just a single problem I'm afraid.

ATB

DaveB

Hi guys,
The Tyne was a pain in the butt from the day it was designed, even during the flight testing of the Vanguard with BEA they started to give some serious problems, failure after failure eventually led to BEA grounding the fleet and giving RR an ultimatum, fix it or else!!
And so it was basically back to the drawing board, the mods to the engine were major to say the least, they needed to add one more stage to the LP comp making it 6 instead of 5, that's why the stages are numbered "0" to "5" and not 1-6, it also required the complete turbine tail bearing to be re-designed to include boundry lubrication, it reduced the HF vibration enough to prevent the bearing from breaking up.

By the time RR got it sort of right, it was recognised as a flop, sort of untrustworthy, even in 1978 when Air Bridge bought the fleet from BA we were lucky to manage 250-350 hours between repairs, the engine was a complete pig to work on, and far too complex, for 13 years I coaxed them up to 2,000 hrs, but I was never aloud time off after that, every trip away for more than a day and I got stuck with it, even crews refused to take the trip if I didn't go with them, but come to think of it..I loved every minute of it!!!
So there you have, a motor complicated enough to make a grown man weep, but the most powerfull turbo prop RR ever produced, and the biggest pain the butt, thank the lord we had MTU to keep them operating for all those years, RR weren't capable!!!.

Robbie